Ytdyklly

I have a function

f(){

    echo 777

}

and a variable to which I assign the "return value" of the function.

x=$(f)

Very concise! However, in my real code, the variable and function names are quite a bit longer and the function also eats positional arguments, so that concise line above, gets very long. Since I like to keep things tidy, I would like to break the code above in two lines.

x=

$(f)

Still works! But: keeping things tidy also means respecting the indentation, so that gives something like

if foo

    x=

    $(f)

fi

which does not work anymore due to whitespaces! Is there a good workaround for this?

You can store the value in $_, which is set to the last argument:

if foo; then

    : "$(f)"

    x=$_

fi

Or can use a subshell to eat the indent:

if foo; then

    x=$(

    )$(f)

fi

Why go for complex, hard-to-read constructs? There is a perfectly natural way to present this which doesn't need any intermediate assignments, fancy ways of building an empty string, quoting subtleties or other cognitive burden.

if foo; then

    x=$(

      a_very_long_command_name --option1='argument 1 is long' 

                               --option2='argument 2 is long as well'

    )

fi

If you are allowed to use here-docs, the following style works good. Quoting the here-doc string with a leading - allows your code to be intended with tabs only.

Something like

if true; then

        read -d '' -r x <<-EOF

        $(f)

        EOF

fi

But remember copy pasting the code from above doesn't work as Stack Exchange replaces tabs with spaces. You need to carefully type in the Tab character for the lines starting with the here-doc and the lines ending the here-doc. My vim configuration has mapped the tab character to 8 spaces. If you want to make it even neater, modify the spacing rule in vim by setting the spacing for tab to 4 spaces as :set tabstop=4

You can see how the Tab is formatted in my script, by looking into it using sed

$ sed -n l script.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash$

$

$

f(){$

    echo 777$

}$

$

if true; then$

tread -d '' -r x <<-PERSON$

t$(f)$

tPERSON$

fi$

$

echo $x$

Notice the t characters in the here-doc string above. If your script looks any different than the above, you would see the whining unexpected EOF errors.

Why split the line at the equals sign? You can just set the arguments to the function in a separate variable:

unset args

args+='arg1 '

args+='arg2 '

args+='arg3 '

x=$(f $args)